The combination of a bit of grapefruit juice with a cancer drug raises levels of efficacy of the compound and this allows you to use lower doses of the drug, according to a study by the University Medical Center in Chicago recently reported. The researchers, in a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research meeting in Denver, Colorado said an initial clinical trial, and with a low number of participants, suggest that the combination could be effective in treating several types of cancer. For nearly two decades pharmaceutical companies have warned on the labels of their products which should not be ingested these citrus juice because it can interfere with enzymes that

break down and eliminate certain medications. This interference makes the compounds are more potent and researchers seek ways to exploit this property of the fruit to alter medications. "Grapefruit juice can increase three to five times the levels of certain drugs in the blood," said study director Ezra Cohen, a cancer specialist at the medical center. "This has always been regarded as something dangerous." "We set out to investigate whether the juice could amplify, and to what extent, availability and perhaps the effectiveness of rapamycin (a drug that is also sold under the generic name of sirolimus and Rapamune factory name), a promising compound in the cancer treatment, "he added. This test was designed to investigate "whether we could use this ability of grapefruit juice to multiply the availability of rapamycin benefit the patient," said Cohen. "We wanted to determine to what extent the juice altered drug levels and assess their impact on anticancer activity and side effects," he added. The study followed 28 patients with solid tumors for which no effective treatment. The dose of the drug increased with each group of five patients, from 15 milligrams to 35 milligrams. Patients taking the drug orally as liquid, once a week. From the second week, patients took the drug followed with a glass (225 grams) of grapefruit juice and grapefruit juice then once a day for the rest of the week. Twenty-five of the participants continued in the study long enough to conduct an evaluation. Seven of the participants (28%) showed a stable disease with little or no tumor growth. One patient (4%) had a partial response in which the tumor shrank by almost 30%. This patient remains in good health more than a year after the start of the test. The patient Albun Duggan, Illinois, has four children and suffers from a rare form of cancer, epithelioid hemangioendothelioma, which originated in the liver and spread to two vertebrae in the neck and lymph nodes. The patient was operated on, she underwent radiation and was evaluated for a liver transplant, but the evidence that the cancer had spread beyond the liver became ineligible for transplantation. Duggan said his doctors told him he could live another five years "and this period ends next July. For a year the disease remained controlled with sorafenib, a compound approved for kidney cancer and liver. But after a year of stability, the tumor began to grow again and Duggan sought an alternative therapy. That's when doctors in Chicago offered the clinical trial with grapefruit. Duggan took the first dose of rapamycin with grapefruit in March 2008 and remains in that regime.